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In rural communities across the tropics, a parasitic disease called schistosomiasis that is carried by freshwater snails currently infects more than 220 million people, rivaling malaria in its prevalence. Capable of residing in an infected human for more than 30 years, the Schistosoma parasite can cause debilitating and often-fatal health complications, including liver failure, bladder cancer, and an increased risk of AIDS. An estimated 280,000 people in Africa alone die each year from the disease. Despite 50 years of medical intervention and the availability of a relatively inexpensive and effective drug, the disease has stubbornly resisted eradication efforts, largely due to the ease with which the parasite reinfects its human hosts.

The Ocean Modeling Forum (OMF) is a University of Washington program run through the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences that aims to bring together interdisciplinary scientists, modeling experts, decision makers, and other people invested in ocean resources. The OMF helps managers frame questions, understand the strengths and limitations of different models, and learn how to incorporate models in their work.

Snake River salmonids are federally protected, but face a succession of dams to navigate from the ocean to the spawning grounds. The final dam in the sequence is the Lower Granite Dam. Ascending salmonids (sockeye salmon, steelhead, and Chinook salmon) all enter the fish ladders on the side of the dam, but some pass straight through and exit above the dam, while others are shunted off to one side and either released after a longer pathway, or held in tanks and sampled before being released to continue up the fish ladders.

The dry northern reaches of Earth contain nearly half of all of the carbon originating in living matter, mostly stored in the frozen soils of the permafrost. It has been long thought that warming in the Arctic will result in this carbon being released from the soil and activated again, through the many lakes that are prominent features of the Arctic.

Shifting baselines is the concept that each human generation thinks “normal” conditions are those when they were growing up, and therefore only takes into account declines during their lifetime, instead of over multiple generations. A new paper now examines newspaper headlines over time to see whether declining fish size is detectable in fish described as superlatively enormous (e.g. “giant”, “huge”, or “monster”), finding declines in reports of lengths.

Citizen science, where the nonexpert public joins in freely to produce useful science, has grown to more than 2100 projects on the SciStarter website alone. These projects range from online identification of astronomical objects, to gaming-like projects predicting how proteins will fold (Foldit), to seasonal bird counts. One long-running project is COASST (Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team) where members of the public conduct monthly surveys of beach areas from California to Alaska looking for bird carcasses.

Male Pacific salmon usually compete aggressively with each other to gain access to spawning females, and are most successful when they are old and large. But a few males come back from the ocean early and small, and with less noticeable male traits. These small males are called “jacks” and cannot win battles of aggression but instead compete by sneaking into the spawning arena and fertilizing eggs on the sly.

Genetic engineering is widely used in plants and animals to promote rapid growth and create resistance to common diseases. One genetic modification that has achieved prominence in fish is the insertion of growth hormone transgenes, which produce dramatically larger sizes and rapid growth rates. However, there is concern that escaped genetically modified fish might breed with their wild counterparts, passing on the genetic modification and changing the wild population.

Long-term life-support in space requires renewable sources of oxygen and food that can survive and thrive in a closed system without any external inputs. In a closed-system experiment, three species of green algae were added to a nutrient mixture together with a grazer species, the common water flea (Daphnia magna). Despite calculations of the appropriate level of carbon and nitrogen needed in the mixture, the pH in the closed system rapidly increased to become highly alkaline (pH 10-11), so much so that most forms of life would not be able to survive.

Managing fisheries usually follows one of three pathways: limiting catches, limiting fishing effort, or limiting where fishing can take place. In a new review, each of these pathways is explored to examine their biological, social and economic implications. Limiting catches includes guideline harvests, strict limits on the total catch, allocations to groups, division of the total catch among individual participants, and fully transferable individual rights to catch a portion of the total allowable catch.